BroadSoft CEO: Here's why communications is moving to the cloud

Matt Rosoff, CITEworld |
April 19, 2013

You might not know BroadSoft if you're not in the telecommunications space. But if you use a hosted unified communications service from a provider like Verizon, Swisscom, or any of about 500 other telcos around the world, you may be a BroadSoft customer without realizing it.

Q: What should we expect to see from BroadSoft over the next year?

A: We're very focused on expanding the unified communications stack. We have quite a bit of work going on to continue to refine the user experience. We do lots of research. We have a fairly rich set of user experience clients out there. We continue to work with both our operators and their end users on fine tuning that experience, making sure that all these capabilities are easy to use. We're clearly building out more capabilities around integrating with mobile networks and we're going to see more and more of our customers go to market with these integrated mobile-led solutions. I mean that's going to be a huge differentiator in the market. We're going to see unified communications solutions that are really first and foremost led by mobile access, mobile devices, and then followed in with fixed devices and with soft clients. We have a number of operators, customers of ours, who launched services like that in Europe. The customer receptivity is really high, and they really never understood they could buy a single subscription. They really thought they'd have to buy PBXs and mobile subscriptions forever, and the concept of being able to buy just one has been extremely powerful in a number of market launches we've seen in the European marketplace. We've seen a really, really strong drive and I think you'll see a lot more of that over the next 12 months.

Q: Is there an enterprise customer that's working with one of your big service providers that we can show as an example of this?

A: I don't really have the ability to talk about the end users. But what I'll do is I'll use BroadSoft as a wonderful end user. We're about 700 employees in about 21 markets. We operate seamlessly across time zones and geography. I work effectively anywhere I am, I have hard phones and soft clients. I'm able to work at home, on the road. I can do video conferencing from hotel rooms on my iPad. The ability for us to just work so effectively across the global landscape is powerful. I think about what it would take to implement what we use internally with premise-based technologies, the cost, the complexity, the infrastructure, the installation - unbelievably complex. Eighteen months ago we moved into our latest office here. Basically, I just unplugged my phone from my last office, plugged my phone in and I was up and running in five minutes with all my unified communications capabilities. To be able to transport yourself anywhere and be connected with the cloud, and have access to all your unified communications capabilities, that's very powerful, very cost effective, very productive for employees.